So this guy

shot this child

dead and that’s ruled self-defense because he said so?

Good luck to the people who let the freakazoid roam the streets of their city free. I hope they don’t look too scary to his diseased brain.

Maybe the smart people of Florida should give Zimmerman a bazooka to make it easier for this unhinged hysteric to protect himself from the terrifying world that surrounds him. Who knows, he might need to mow down a menacing little old lady or an evil toddler.

What is really scary, though, is how many of these untreated hysterics roam the streets and how many similarly sick hysterics are eager to celebrate them.

I’m a philologist and I’ve been one since the age of four when my father taught me how to analyze a sentence in terms of the parts of speech it contains and the function each word performs in them. Words have meaning, and if we are careless with that meaning, we run the risk that somebody who who is less lazy and more attentive to the power of words might use them against us.

Yesterday at the birth class, we were told by both lecturers and read in the hand-out they gave us that “a woman’s body was made to carry a pregnancy to term and give birth.” The question I had when I heard this was which worldview this idea represented.

It is obviously not a scientific worldview (which one would really prefer to encounter at a hospital) because modern science does not accept the idea of a purposeful Maker who creates people and determines what their goals should be.

This is not part of the Judeo-Christian worldview either because, according to the Old Testament, painful birth is punishment God imposed on humanity for the original sin. When Eve was first created, there was no talk of pregnancies or delivery of babies.

I have no idea how other religions approach this issue but I highly doubt that they could have had a huge impact on our tiny town in the midst of the Bible Belt.

The only explanation I’m left with for this pearl of dubious wisdom is that it originated in what I call the “Dr. Phil entertains intellectually limited housewives” philosophy. The philosophy’s central tenet is that you can say any number of stupid things and get idiots to nod happily in agreement if you preface your unintelligent idea with “we are hard-wired to. . .” The passive voice construction and the quasi-scientific terminology sound extremely convincing to those who are both pretentious and silly.

Dr. Phil might not be a real doctor but he can make hospital workers parrot his ideas, and that’s quite an achievement.

P.S. If you want to inform me that this verbal atrocity is “just a way of speaking,” please concentrate and re-read the first paragraph of this post.

A loser du jour came to this blog yesterday to announce to me that a fetus is not part of a pregnant woman’s body because something something. . . placenta seperates. . . something something. . . placenta is a body part but a fetus inside it somehow isn’t.

It is really funny that this preachy idiot who – I am absolutely sure – has no capacity to be pregnant at all would try to educate me about “seperating placentas” at this particular moment in time. As I as reading the idiot’s comment, I was suffering from an affliction called “pruritic urticarial papules and plaques of pregnancy.”

PUPPP is a very nasty rash that 1 in 200 pregnant women get in the last weeks of pregnancy. Usually, it afflicts women who are carrying boys. The rash is so bad that many women ask to be induced weeks earlier than their due date, and many doctors actually agree because women suffer so badly. Believe me, this is horrible suffering. I have no idea what can carry one through it other than the knowledge that one has freely chosen pregnancy for oneself.

The rash happens when fetal cells invade the skin cells of the woman. Tests have shown that male DNA is present in the skin eruptions of women with PUPPP who are pregnant with boys. Does this sound close enough to a body part for everybody?

This is what the fight for the reproductive rights is like: women, doctors, and scientists try to explain what a pregnancy is to a world filled with officious losers who know nothing about the functioning of the human body but believe themselves to be entitled to decide what happens in the bodies of others.